Harlequin in Hell: Marlow and the Russian Sailor in Conrad's Heart of Darkness
On Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Author: James Morgan
From: Heart of Darkness, New Edition, Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations.
"Harlequin," C. G. Jung wrote, "gives me the creeps," due to the ambiguous nature of the archetype. As a result, Jung was unable to determine whether or not Harlequin as an archetype successfully passes through hell: "He is indeed the hero who must pass through the perils of Hades, but will he succeed? That is a question I cannot answer."1 The Russian sailor in Conrad's Heart of Darkness is not the hero of the novella, but Marlow's identification of him as a harlequin who presents an "unsolvable problem" leaves readers similarly wondering what to make of the enigmatic character. He seems to reside like the "meaning" of one of Marlow's tales, "not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze."2 Marlow's shifting responses to the Russian sailor and his own psychological imperatives, which cause him simultaneously to reveal and to conceal his identification with the Russian, create such an ambiguous haze compounded by our tendency as readers to interpret the Russian harlequin as a symbol rather than as an archetypal prototype who represents not a goal but a stage Marlow is only partially successful in passing through in his journey.
Marlow's initial responses to the Russian sailor, and those of many subsequent critics, derive from associations of Harlequin with the Commedia dell'Arte and the comic conventions of court jesters and fools. The Russian sailor immediately brings Harlequin to Marlow's mind by his "funny" appearance: the "parti-colored rags"3 covering his clothing and his "extremely gay"4 antic disposition. This association is reinforced by the sailor's mercurial disposition conveyed by rapid shifts in his speech and mood, "with smiles and frowns chasing each other over that open countenance like sunshine and shadow on a wind-swept plain."5 Marlow is "seduced" into "something like admiration—like envy" for the sailor's obedience to the "absolutely pure, uncalculating, unpractical spirit of adventure" burning with a "modest and clear flame."6 Surely Marlow shares the same spirit of adventure dating from the days he spent in childhood poring over the uncharted blank spaces in maps, "a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over."7 Nevertheless, Marlow distances himself from the Russian sailor by attributing to him a naive innocence prepared for rhetorically by the conventions of the fool: "I did not envy him his devotion to Kurtz, though. He had not meditated over it."8 Attempting to disavow his own relationship to Kurtz, Marlow ridicules the Russian sailor as "Kurtz's last disciple."9
From Marlow's implicit identification with the Russian harlequin and explicit disavowal of that identification, critics have pursued wildly divergent analyses. On the one hand, John W. Canario sees the Russian as "a white aborigine" who through identification triggers in Marlow a "profound realization that aboriginal man possesses a capacity for humane behavior and a primitive sense of honor that makes him impervious to the greed that corrupts civilized Europeans" and is symbolized by Kurtz.10 On the other hand, Jack Helder sees the Russian as a "traditional simpleton" whose "inability to understand his experience with Kurtz … most distinguishes him from Marlow, and which finally renders him most sinister."11 This harlequin belongs to the group of fools such as "hunchbacks, dwarves, etc." whose physical "deformity" reveals "the spiritual poverty manifested by the colonization movement, and by mankind in general" and thus "cannot be absolved from a strong measure of guilt for what happened to Kurtz … by his failure to represent any moral standard."12 This "deformed simpleton devoid of moral sense" has "no mind at all" and "serves no useful function in the struggle of mankind against the forces of chaos."13
Reconciling such antithetical responses to the Russian sailor is complicated by Marlow's unreliability as narrator. Barry Stampfl points out that Marlow's expressed inability to understand the purpose of "a vast artificial hole" he "avoided" as he approached the Company's station, clearly a mass grave for the dying native workers, exposes the use of psychological repression to evade recognition of his complicity in the atrocities taking place.14 Similarly Marlow asserts that his audience knows "I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie" because there is "a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies,"15 but of course ends his tale by revealing the lie he tells Kurtz's Intended concerning his last words. Marlow, Stampfl asserts, "really believes in some of these lies (that is, in the saving power of 'efficiency')" in order to avoid "associations injurious to his ideal self-image."16 Through repression Marlow thus uses language to "both cover up and reveal at the same moment."17
This deceptive use of language helps us to understand how one reader responds to Marlow's identification with the Russian sailor while another responds to his repudiation of the same character, for Marlow wishes, it seems, to reveal and simultaneously conceal his identification with the Russian in order to avoid acknowledging the depth of devotion to Kurtz he shares with his brother sailor. Indeed, Marlow and the Russian share far more than a spirit of adventure and an appreciation for Towson's An Inquiry into Some Points of Seamanship. Marlow accuses the Russian sailor of a lack of "meditation" over his devotion to Kurtz, yet Marlow's own meditation seems to occur only after Kurtz's death: "I had—for my sins—I suppose, to go through the ordeal of looking into it myself."18 Indeed, Marlow silences the Russian sailor in order to evade the full knowledge of Kurtz's activities by shouting: "I don't want to know anything of the ceremonies used when approaching Mr. Kurtz."19 And with his visit to the Intended Marlow fulfills his role as the last disciple of Kurtz: "I did not betray Mr. Kurtz—it was ordered I should never betray him—it was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice."20
Marlow's concealment of his identification with the Russian sailor's devotion to Kurtz, ironically, also conceals his identification with the Russian's moral sense that Helder denies exists. This morality is displayed by the Russian's repayment of Van Shuyten's stake, by his disinterest in money and material possessions, by his use of firearms, as far as we know, solely to procure food for himself and the natives (whom he speaks with in their native tongue), by his refusal to participate in Kurtz's illicit activities, and by his tending to the ill Kurtz in the face of threats to his own life, going ten days without sleep. This last role of nurse to Kurtz is adopted by Marlow on the journey down the river. Marlow may snicker when the Russian says that he talked with Kurtz about "Everything! … Of love too,"21 but the Russian's mind has been "enlarged" by the humanist, non-materialistic, spiritual values Kurtz came to the Congo to disseminate and which initially attract Marlow to Kurtz, not by the atrocities Kurtz has hypocritically committed. From this viewpoint, rather than neglecting "to hint however subtly or tentatively at an alternative frame of reference by which we may judge the actions and opinions of [Conrad's] characters," including Marlow, as Chinua Achebe accuses Conrad of doing in Heart of Darkness, Conrad hints at such a reference point in the character of the Russian sailor.22
What, then, are we to make of this harlequin in the heart of darkness? Into the gaps and ambiguities created by Marlow steps the reader, but interpreting the Russian harlequin as a symbol rather than as an archetype may exacerbate rather than resolve the "problem" Marlow is either unable or unwilling to solve himself. As a multivalent symbol, harlequin leads to an array of meanings ranging, as we have seen, from clown, court jester, fool, to "white aborigine" and "deformed simpleton," none of which is very satisfying when applied by itself to the Russian sailor. Viewing the Russian as an archetype rather than as a symbol, however, allows us to see him as representing a psychological pattern rather than as a signifier of one or more specific meanings. From this perspective, the Russian sailor is not a foil to Marlow but a prototype representing a stage of psychological development Marlow experiences through his journey into the heart of darkness and passes beyond.23
Jung's brief analysis of Harlequin focuses on the character as an archetype of initiation. According to Jung, Harlequin is an "ancient chthonic god,"24 an identification that explicates on a mythological level the Russian sailor's presence at the Inner Station that is so inexplicable to Marlow. Jung cites Faust as a Harlequin who descends "to the crazy primitive world of the witches' sabbath,"25 a descent traced by Marlow in his encounter with the two uncanny women, one with a cat on her lap and a wart on her nose, knitting black wool and "guarding the door of Darkness."26 Yet even Jung seems left with more questions than answers as to the significance of Harlequin's descent:
Harlequin wanders like Faust through all these forms, though sometimes nothing betrays his presence but his wine, his lute, or the bright lozenges of his jester's costume. And what does he learn on his wild journey through man's millennial history? What quintessence will he distil from this accumulation of rubbish and decay, from these half-born or aborted possibilities of form and colour? What symbol will appear as the final cause and meaning of all this disintegration?27
Harlequin's journey, Jung argues, is "a descent into the cave of initiation and secret knowledge" leading to "the restoration of the whole man, by awakening the memories in the blood" of the "sinfully whole human being" symbolized for Faust by "Paris united with Helen,"
The homo totus who was forgotten when contemporary man lost himself in one-sidedness. It is he who at all times of upheaval has caused the tremor of the upper world, and always will. This man stands opposed to the man of the present, because he is the one who ever is as he was, whereas the other is what he is only for a moment. With my patients, accordingly, the katabasis and katalysis are followed by a recognition of the bipolarity of human nature and of the necessity of conflicting pairs of opposites. After the symbols of madness experienced during the period of disintegration there follow images which represent the coming together of the opposites: light/dark, above/below, white/black, male/female, etc.28
Harlequin's descent as an archetype for psychic disintegration and polarization into binary oppositions perhaps explains at least one puzzling aspect of the Russian sailor's behavior. For the often libidinous Harlequin, the Russian's hostility to the "wild and gorgeous apparition of a woman," presumably Kurtz's lover, whom the Russian sailor "would have tried to shoot" if she attempted to come aboard the steamer29 seems out of character. The disintegration of binary opposites and their polarization may bring male and female into conflict and antagonism rather than into attraction and conciliation.
Much as heroes from Ajax to Luke Skywalker have left the protective world of the mother, Marlow's journey conforms to Jung's analysis of Harlequin's journey by tracing key elements of an archetypal initiation rite: separation, transformation, and return. The archetype of initiation is defined by Joseph L. Henderson as "the symbolic means by which the ego separates itself from the archetypes evoked by the parental images in early childhood." By such rites "young men and women are weaned away from their parents and forcibly made members of their clan or tribe. But in making this break with the childhood world, the original parent archetype will be injured, and the damage must be made good by a healing process of assimilation into the life of the group."30 Just as the initiation journey often begins with the taking leave of the mother in order to uncover a secret truth, so Marlow takes leave of his symbolic mother, his ridiculed "excellent aunt."31 His journey into the cave of initiation takes him into the heart of darkness where he witnesses both sides of human nature dissolved into separate components—the spiritual and physical, male and female, white and black—and receives a terrible secret knowledge summarized by Kurtz's last words: "The horror! The horror!"32 Kurtz's last words are not solely a moral judgment passed on himself but an expression of the truth of human existence he has gained first hand and passes on to Marlow.
Subsequently, Marlow undergoes his own near-death experience, a symbolic psychic death and rebirth, before returning a changed man able to take his place in the tribe or community represented by the men in the Company to whom he tells his story aboard the Nellie. Along the way he finds himself back in "the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams."33 Having glimpsed the Truth, Marlow thus returns to find, like Buddha before him, the materialistic life of the senses to be trivial and therefore spiritually unsatisfying after discovering, according to Jerome Thale, "not transcendent being but the heart of man."34